Networked computer systems provide a convenient method for sharing data and facilitating distributed processing among multiple, and often remote, users and systems. With the increasing speed of technology, new products and systems are entering the market with an ever-increasing pace. To strike a balance between the desire to obtain the latest technological functionality available against market requirements to keep costs down, many industries maintain heterogeneous networks. A heterogeneous network is a network that is diverse across its network processing nodes in either or all of its system hardware, operating systems, and applications.
Network systems are generally monitored and maintained by system administrators. System administrators learn the state of the network system by being notified of certain system events. Typically, operating systems and certain applications executing on a network processing node store system event data which may be of interest to the system administrator in a product specific event repository. The event repository may be implemented as an ASCII error log, or may be a more sophisticated database upon which a product specific event browser is employed to view and sort the system event data.
Present day product specific event browsers are typically available from vendors of a given operating system or application. In order to view the event data stored in a given product's event repository, a user must use the vendor's product specific event browser. This may be inconvenient on a heterogeneous platform where the system administrator is running on a remote system under a different platform. Accordingly, a need exists for a universal event browser which generates a viewable system events window with desired filtering capability from a variety of different back-end products, including operating systems and applications.